Many years ago when I started in HR I shadowed another HR Manager for a few weeks. During one of those weeks she spent almost two days writing a two page staff newsletter: two days!! It was amended and tweaked a thousand times and she didn't want it to go out unless it was 100% - even though Rome was somewhat burning around her with multiple issues going on! Every yes we say to something is a no to something else and it's all very well to be proud of perfectionism but it can often come at a cost.
You’ve probably experienced this in action: it’s 5:30 PM and you could probably just hit send on that last deliverable and leave work. But you figure you might as well spend 30 more minutes on it before sending, and you stay a bit later.
Did the extra half hour make that much of a difference? Perhaps, but it’s more likely that it just made you feel more confident in the quality of your work. And so we end up believing that spending more time on our work makes it better.
If that wasn't enough, according to recent research : managers struggle to distinguish between those who work 80-hour weeks and those who work 50-60 hour weeks, suggesting that the extra work generally isn’t noticed!
As we know, Pareto's Principle tells us that 80% of the value comes from 20% of the work, so we can see how perfecting our work generally returns small value for a high cost. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t ever perfect our work. It just means we should only do it when it will contribute significantly to the impact of the work.
It really is ok for something to sometimes go out, say, 90% correct, because the other 10% is often not noticed and not making much of a difference. We often stress about this and have conditioned ourselves to make sure every last thing is checked, tweaked etc but it only takes a few experiments with letting things go at 90% to start to realise that the sky didn't fall in, life carried on and you have saved time for other productive and impactful stuff to get done too!
